And then the bird-man got back in his little sulky seat, and he waved his hand to us, and he left his machine run down the field, and lift, and head straight for open country. His way lay, it seemed, right acrost Friendship Village; and he’d no more’n started before the band started too, playing the tune that by now was in everybody’s veins. And behind them the children fell in, singing again, and with the people streaming behind them they all marched off down Daphne Street—where the little shops lay waiting to be opened, and the polls was waiting to be voted in, and Friendship Village was waiting for us to know it was a town, like it meant.
All us ladies went to scraping up plates like fury. Excep’ Mis’ Toplady. She stood for a minute wiping her eyes on a paper napkin. And she says:
“Oh, ladies. I ain’t never felt so much like a human being since I was born one.”
And me, I stood there looking across the Market Square to the school-house. There it was, with its doors open and the new voting machine setting in the hall,—they’d took the polls out of the barber shop and the livery stable sole because the voting machine got in the way of trade. They’d put it in the school-house. And it was to the school-house that the men were going now.
“Oh,” I says to Mis’ Toplady, “would you think anybody could go in a child’s school-house, and vote for anybody that—”
“No, no,” she says, “you wouldn’t think so, would you?”
But she didn’t look at me. She was looking over to the school-house steps. Lem Toplady stood there, and Jimmy Sturgis, Jr., and Hugh Merriman and Mis’ Uppers’s boy—watching the last of the bird-man and the air-wagon flying down the sky. When it had gone, the four boys turned and went together up the steps of the school-house. And Mis’ Toplady and Mis’ Sturgis and Mis’ Fire Chief Merriman and Mis’ Uppers stood and watched them—going in to vote now, to the place where the four mothers had seen them go ever since they were little bits of boys, with faces and clothes to be kept clean, and lessons to learn, and lunch baskets to fill. Then the mothers could either do these things for them—or anyway help along. Now they stood there doing nothing, watching, while their boys went in to do their first vote—into the school-house where they’d learned their A B C’s.
“Ain’t that—ain’t it just—?” I says low to Mis’ Toplady; and kind of stopped.
“Ain’t it?” she says, fervent and low too. “Oh, ain’t it?”
“The time’ll come,” I says, “when you mothers, and me too, will go in there with them. And when we’ll go straight from a great public meeting—like this—to a great public business like that. And when it comes—”